Sequential color display systems such as Digital Micromirror Devices (DMD) and others use solid state illuminators such as LEDs, with fixed duty cycles and minimal current variation to adjust the brightness of images. One such approach involves varying duty cycles of illuminators and overlapping primary colors of the image. This requires high fidelity control of the time line resulting in more bit planes and a complicated display driver with excess power consumption due to additional switching. To overlap primary colors, more than one illuminator at any given instance must be powered up resulting in instantaneous power draw increases and requiring a complex and expensive power supply scheme.
Another approach involves varying the intensity of solid state illuminators. This approach is based on an assumption of linear brightness response of solid state illuminators; however, these solid-state illuminators do not have linear response relationship between applied power and brightness. The linear relationship approach requires constant power usage and produces non-optimal image brightness and color drift. In this approach, the white point of the image varies as the currents are linearly adjusted. Various different approaches and related background is described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,982,827, 8,253,755, and 8,305,387 the descriptions of which are incorporated herein in its entirety by reference for all purposes.